THE ADOLESCENTS IN TIMES OF PANDEMIC

Abstract

This paper focuses on epochal actors that become relevant in the passage from childhood to adolescence. For an adolescent, the valuing gaze of the adults who raise him/her is a necessary condition, but it is not enough. The social environment, particularly the peer group and the institutions to which he/she belongs, plays a supporting and important role at the moment when the process of detachment from parental figures begins.

In these times of pandemic, with social and compulsory isolation, virtuality is a tool that brings closer and creates a bonding universe. Inhabiting different devices, different platforms, being users of a connective world, turns us into producers of digital culture, another way of organizing the bonding experience. Faced with the urgency of life, to oppose the creative potential, hope and illusion is to challenge the conditions of life in the contemporary context and thus feel capable of facing one of the great earthquakes of history.

Key words: pandemic; adolescence; virtuality; isolation; loneliness; uncertainty; finitude.